Free Republic

The notebooks of the English aesthete Geoffrey Madan (1895–1947) are a trove of amusing aperçus, anecdotes, and apothegms. Among the many memorable gems Madan collected was the description of one now-forgotten character as “an intellectual without an intellect.” We thought of that observation while contemplating the inaugural issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, which rolled off the press last month. It’s been a few years since we’ve had occasion to notice Lewis H. Lapham in this space. In October 2004, we reported on “Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill.” This 7,500-word philippic appeared in the September 2004 issue of Harper’s, the...

Since the president’s re-election, loathers of George W. Bush have had no shortage of cudgels with which to club him: a distressingly belated response to Hurricane Katrina; an experiment in warrantless wiretapping; a modest parade of indictments; a nation-building project so distant from its original intent that our troops are now caught in a proto-civil war. One can certainly understand how these developments — and Bush’s correspondingly rotten approval ratings — have emboldened the opposition. The problem is that these developments have also made the president’s critics more susceptible to rhetorical excess, and Bush, like his predecessor, already has an...

Harper's Magazine used to be known as a respectable literary magazine. No more. A few weeks back they published an article by Lewis H. Lapham (I think it rhymes with "laugh at him") called "The Case for Impeachment" that makes Kos and Cindy Sheehan look like well-reasoned academics. Instead of taking the time to point out Lapham's delusions, I'll just show this exerpt because it speaks for itself: That President George W. Bush comes to power with the intention of invading Iraq is a fact not open to dispute. Pleased with the image of himself as a military hero, and having...

As a businessperson, shareholder or citizen, you probably favor low taxes, smaller rather than larger government, traditional families and a strong defense. You may even think such views are common-sense and rooted in life experience. Wrong, says a magazine editor who personifies liberalism until it hurts -- both him and his organization. He sees Americans as so bamboozled by ideas from the right, financed by "ultraconservative millionaires," that we've been softened to brainlessness. Never mind the liberalbias that oozes from campuses, movies and mainstream media. It's conservatism that leads us lambs astray, says Lewis H. Lapham. The editor of Harper's...

NEW YORK – Lewis Lapham was decidedly underwhelmed by the Republican National Convention. In his latest polemic, the editor of the once-respected Harper's Magazine sneers that President Bush "was trundled into New York City this August with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the heavy law enforcement and paper elephants." "The speeches in Madison Square Garden," he continued, "affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal" editorial page, about the primacy of free markets and the declining significance of government. Of course, Lapham was entitled to fair (or even unfair) comment on the GOP...

http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/006531.shtml#006531 August 23, 2004 I Remember It Like It Was Next Week In the latest issue of Harper's, Lewis Lapham has a long, tiresome essay on the "Republican propaganda mill"--which, to judge by one of the accompanying graphs, includes the foundation that publishes Reason. (No wonder we find ourselves praising the president so often.) Lapham briefly mentions but otherwise ignores ideological divisions on "the right," lumping together "the Catholic conservatives with the Jewish neoconservatives, the libertarians with the authoritarians, the evangelical nationalists with the paranoid monetarists, Pat Robertson with the friends of the Ku Klux Klan." According to Lapham, all...